One-to-One (1:1) Computing

  • One-to-one (1:1) computing offers students and teachers continuous access to a wide range of software, electronic documents, the Internet, and other digital resources for teaching and learning. Technology in schools today is as basic as pencils and books. By providing students an electronic device to access the Internet, digital course materials and digital textbooks, students have access to information, are engaged in learning, and take responsibility for their own learning. 

    Beginning in the 2016-17 school year, all middle and high school students were officially assigned a Chromebook for instructional purposes to use at school and home. Elementary students have access to chromebooks and digital resources in the classroom and currently use Chromebooks in school only.   

     
    Why Chromebooks? 
    Chromebooks represent a new space in technology between tablets and laptops. As a web-­based device, the Chromebook reduces technical issues that arise with regular laptops. The work the student complete automatically saves to the cloud. This expands collaboration between teacher to students, and student to student. The issue of usable battery life is reduced since a Chromebook usually last the whole school day.

    Our Chromebooks are different than the consumer version available to the public. As a GoogleApps for Education school, we are able to set-up and control the Chromebooks through a web-based "management" page. This means we can apply specific policies to groups of students such as allowing only certain apps to be installed or differentiating apps based on individual student needs.

     
    When did the District launch 1:1 computing?
    Chromebooks were piloted with all 3rd and 4th grade students in the 2013-14 school year with the purpose of bringing affordable, easy-to-manage technology into the classroom.  The impact to learning was significant, resulting in increased productivity, dynamic collaboration and real-time corrective learning within the classroom.  As a result of the pilot and the passing of the 2014 Technology Levy, the district was able to deploy devices to all students.
     
     
    In what ways are Chromebooks used in the classroom? 
    Chromebooks provide a powerful platform for facilitating collaboration within the classroom.  When working as a group, students can collectively add ideas and resources into an assignment and see everyone’s changes in real time.  This is especially helpful in a classroom environment when students are sharing collective work and learning new concepts.  

    In addition, Chromebooks provides individual teacher to student opportunities to correct some things without the traditional red pen markup that has happened in the past.  Rough drafts are no longer papers that are submitted, but a process in which teachers can guide a student through a writing assignment, for example.  

    Another powerful teaching feature of Google Apps is the restore revision feature.  The Google Drive’s auto-save feature keeps a revision history in which students can see earlier versions of their work at any point in time.  This revision history is significant as it gives the teacher the ability to view and revert back to earlier versions of student work to see if concepts are being understood and adjust teaching methods – real time - where needed.   


    How does 1:1 computing help parents?
    The district is not only engaging students with technology, but parents.  The Google Drive gives students the ability to create, save, store and share school work all in one place.  An internet connection is all that is needed to access a student’s google drive from any device.     This gives parents the ability to view current student work and ongoing classroom assignments anywhere at any time.